The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea.
Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
1. "Bear the Cross cheerfully and it will bear you."
Thomas a Kempis, "The Imitation of Christ"
Other categories: God and Religion
2. "Anesthesia: wounds without pain. Neurasthenia: pain without wounds."
Karl Kraus, "Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths"
3. "Misfortune is never invited. And it comes and sits at the table without permission and it eats, leaving nothing but bones."
Jacques Roumain
Other categories: Various
4. "Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it."
Jane Wagner
Other categories: Reality and Imagination
5. "The pleasure of those who injure you lies in your pain. Therefore they will suffer if you take away their pleasure by not feeling pain."
Tertullian, "De patientia"
6. "No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown."
William Penn, "No Cross, No Crown"
Other categories: Authority, Government
7. "Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt."
Jose Ortega y Gasset, "In Search of Goethe from Within"
Other categories: Work and Laziness
8. "International business may conduct its operations with scraps of paper, but the ink it uses is human blood."
Eric Ambler, "A Coffin for Dimitrios"
Other categories: Richness and Money
9. "The drama of life begins with a wail and ends with a sigh."
Minna Antrim, "Naked Truth and Veiled Allusions"
Other categories: Life and Death
10. "Pain has its reasons, pleasure is totally indifferent."
Francis Picabia, "Who Knows: Poems and Aphorisms"
Other categories: Happiness
11. "Maybe men are separated from each other only by the degree of their misery."
Francis Picabia
Other categories: Human
12. "To feel our ills is one thing, but to cure them is another."
Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), "Epistolae ex Ponto"
Other categories: Health and Alcohol
13. "The main motive for “nonattachment” is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work."
George Orwell, "Shooting an Elephant"
Other categories: Love
14. "One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea."
Walter Bagehot, "Physics and Politics"
Other categories: Human
15. "None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry."
Edith Hamilton, "The Greek Way"
Other categories: Art and Culture
16. "A mother’s life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears."
Honoré De Balzac
Other categories: Family and Loneliness
17. "Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed."
Natalie Clifford Barney
Other categories: Time and Passing
18. "When the book comes out it may hurt you — but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself."
James Baldwin, "A Dialogue"
Other categories: Art and Culture
19. "That's the secret to life... replace one worry with another..."
Charles Monroe Schulz, "Charlie Brown"
Other categories: Life and Death
20. "One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love."
Sophocles
Other categories: Love
21. "All the [hours] wound you, the last one kills."
Latin proverb, (inscription on clocks)
Other categories: Inscriptions etc. -:- Time and Passing
22. "Revenge is a confession of pain."
Latin proverb
Other categories: Anger
23. "We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full."
Marcel Proust
Other categories: Health and Alcohol
24. "Without health, life is not life; it is only a state of languor and suffering."
Francois Rabelais
Other categories: Health and Alcohol -:- Life and Death
25. "The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea."
Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Other categories: Health and Alcohol
26. "The man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears."
Michel de Montaigne
Other categories: Bravery and Fear
27. "Giving birth is like taking your lower lip and forcing it over your head."
Carol Burnett
28. "Give me blood and I shall give you freedom."
Subhas Chandra Bose
Other categories: Freedom and Servitude
29. "Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional."
M. Kathleen Casey
30. "Patience is the plaster of all sores."
Irish proverb
Other categories: Sorrow and Nostalgia
31. "Turn your wounds into wisdom."
Oprah Winfrey
Other categories: Wisdom and Stupidity
32. "Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Other categories: Joy and Sadness
33. "If you remain angry at someone, then who is suffering?"
Tristan J. Loo
Other categories: Anger
34. "What soap is for the body, tears are for the soul."
Jewish proverb
35. "What doesn't hurt - is not life; what doesn't pass - is not happiness."
Ivo Andrić
Other categories: Time and Passing
36. "Don't hold to anger, hurt or pain. They steal your energy and keep you from love."
Leo Buscaglia
Other categories: Love -:- Anger
37. "A good friend sees the first tear, catches the second and stops the third."
(?)
Other categories: Friendship and Hostility
38. "Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune."
William James
39. "It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive."
William Somerset Maugham, "Moon and Sixpence"
Other categories: Happiness
40. "It is not work that kills, but worry."
English proverb
Other categories: Work and Laziness
41. "There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers."
Saint Teresa of Avila (Teresa de Jesús)
Other categories: God and Religion
42. "I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love."
Mother Teresa of Calcutta
Other categories: Love
43. "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
Clive Staples Lewis, "The Problem of Pain"
44. "Cities are the abyss of the human species."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Other categories: Various
45. "Physical prowess is for cowards; a little pain builds character."
(?)
46. "Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it."
Mark Twain
Other categories: Nature and Animals
47. "He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears."
Michel de Montaigne
Other categories: Bravery and Fear
48. "God has commanded Time to console the unhappy."
Joseph Joubert
Other categories: Time and Passing
49. "Beauty can pierce one like pain."
Thomas Mann
Other categories: Beauty and Ugliness
50. "If you suffer, thank God! - it is a sure sign that you are alive."
Elbert Green Hubbard
2007, collected and compiled by Kazimierz Matan
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